The government's top scientists built some of the most amazing technology we use today

DARPA

Many of the staples of modern technology we take for granted have roots in the military's research and development arm.

Created after the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) makes investments and conducts research into game-changing technologies with national security implications. Just this week, the agency announced planned funding for military cyborgs.

While the agency's breakthroughs on cyborgs or stealth technology may not have obvious civilian applications, much of DARPA's past research does. 

Whether you're using the Internet or GPS, you have some of the government's top scientists to thank.

Most of the functions of computing we often take for granted originated with DARPA back in the 1960s.

In 1968, Douglas Engelbart showed off a revolutionary computer known as oN-Line System (NLS) in a presentation now known as "The Mother of All Demos." The crowd was blown away by never-before-seen tech, like a computer mouse and graphical user interface.

In his 90-minute presentation, Engelbart and his colleagues at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) — helped with funding from DARPA and the US Air Force — floored the crowd in San Francisco.

Their NLS system laid the groundwork for Xerox PARC's Alto computer that came five years later (Steve Jobs used Alto's innovations to help build the Macintosh).

The NLS was the first computer with:

— a mouse

— a graphical user interface

— hypertext links that users could click on for more information

Source: Darpa

A collaborative document creation tool called "The Journal," essentially a primitive precursor to modern Wikis or Google Docs, also came out of NLS,

Source: Stanford University